So who are the team leads at The NEXT Stage 2023 Event? Noah Nelson, Kathryn Yu and Eric Vosmeier. And why do I know them? Because of their passion for encouraging the growth of projects that connect theatre with immersive gaming, arg creations, emerging technologies, digital assets and everything in between. You might know them from their main flagship No Proscenium.com, a site that serves a thriving community of innovators immersed in the art of storytelling.
I was introduced to this community through my friend Michael J. Andersen who is the lead behind ARG.net, a collection and archive of some of the notable Alternate Reality Games in the industry. And yes although the terms may be confusing, Alternate Reality Games are very different from Augmented Reality Games. Both genres share the same moniker ARG's. It actually took me awhile to figure out the differences but once I settled on 'game/theatre/escape rooms' versus digital representations ... I finally got it.
So what did I learn in the quick turnaround of three days that I had at Next Stage Immersive? Having just arrived from Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara (what a blast!), I had to quickly switch gears from listening to such visionaries as Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash) and Ori Inbar (Everything is SUPER!) to meeting people who actually worked the scrumptiously dirty trenches of experiential storytelling.
While so many of the events and presentations were inspiring (I loved the participatory workshops), the conference organizers demonstrated true courage and leadership by serving up experience failures as a way to highlight the need for transparency and unbiased audience user testing.
The most gut-wrenching talk to witness was the 20/20 hindsight breakdown of the demise of the luxurious Star Wars hotel (Galactic Starcruiser Experience). Heralded as the true litmus test that would define and coalesce future experience adventures, it was suggested that the price point for vacationing at the location may have been out of most fan's ranges.
Such painful lessons were delivered to the event crowd with a generous sense of wisdom mixed with grace, compassion and a sense of duty aimed at sharing and educating the next generation of dreamers. In the end, the intimate setting of the Next Stage Conference gave me the opportunity to speak to a lot of people engaged in experimental work that tested the divide between physical versus digital storytelling while providing us with a landscape of 'how to's regarding funding or content creation.
With some tips in mind, I returned home and the next year was able to pull together a successful prototype called Spark and Sound, an experience that harnessed the power of dance, interactive sound and communication all wrapped up in an explosion of play and future storytelling. It was my first experiment outside of my usual realm that helped to move people cautiously out of the covid era of experiences in isolation (VR anybody?) into a time of audience interactivity and participation.
Thank you Kathryn, Noah and Eric for a terrific conference! Your passion for what you do is oxygen to a flame.
